The Art of the Moving Picture

INTENDED, FIRST OF ALL, FOR THE NEW ART MUSEUMS SPRINGING UP ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. BUT THE BOOK IS FOR OUR UNIVERSITIES AND INSTITUTIONS OF LEARNING. IT CONTAINS AN APPEAL TO OUR WHOLE CRITICAL AND LITERARY WORLD, AND TO OUR CREATORS OF SCULPTURE, ARCHITECTURE, PAINTING, AND THE AMERICAN CITIES THEY ARE BUILDING. BEING THE 1922 REVISION OF THE BOOK FIRST ISSUED IN 1915, AND BEGINNING WITH AN AMPLE DISCOURSE ON THE GREAT NEW PROSPECTS OF 1922
Hail, all ye gods in the house of the soul, who weigh Heaven and Earth in a balance, and who give celestial food.
From the book of the scribe Ani, translated from the original Egyptian hieroglyphics by Professor E.A. Wallis Budge .


The Art of the Moving Picture, as it appeared six years ago, possessed among many elements of beauty at least one peculiarity. It viewed art as a reality, and one of our most familiar and popular realities as an art. This should have made the book either a revelation or utter Greek to most of us, and those who read it probably dropped it easily into one or the other of the two categories.
For myself, long a propagandist for its doctrines in another but related field, the book came as a great solace. In it I found, not an appeal to have the art museum used—which would have been an old though welcome story—not this, but much to my surprise, the art museum actually at work, one of the very wheels on which our culture rolled forward upon its hopeful way. I saw among other museums the one whose destinies I was tenderly guiding, playing in Lindsay's book the part that is played by the classic myths in Milton, or by the dictionary in the writings of the rest of us. For once the museum and its contents appeared, not as a lovely curiosity, but as one of the basic, and in a sense humble necessities of life. To paraphrase the author's own text, the art museum, like the furniture in a good movie, was actually in motion —a character in the play. On this point of view as on a pivot turns the whole book.